Hello all!

I don't normally do these sort of posts, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to talk about my game, as well as one or two updates I have planned. Working on this project was certainly an experience, I will say.

No sooner had the jam started, I was moving to a new place to live and would have been without my PC for the entire month of September. So, I focused solely on the art at first, drawing backgrounds and sprites as quickly and efficiently as I could to ensure they would fit my standards. This is why all of the sprites lack proper shading actually (aside from subtle colour washes of course)! As I know adding that and having to edit it to match the sprites expressions would be quite time-consuming for me.

(I will also say, having a deliberately limited palette for their outfits very much helped me 'tie' them to the same world, something I have had to go back and fix with previous projects)

Whilst I did not have time to finish all of my backgrounds on my PC, I was still able to draw them on one of my older devices. The time limit for myself also made me decide to make the backgrounds consist of one/two colours as well! Bedroom was blue, Dungeons was purple etc. And, I ended up quite liking it! I felt like it made the backgrounds more unique to look at.

(these are also the two BGs done exclusively on my PC btw!)

Finally, there was the illustrations, which I deliberately kept as rough sketches so that I would not stress out over one being perfectly lined and another looking like it was still a draft (although ironically, what I consider 'rough sketches' are still very neat, such as the illustrations present in Ending 4 and 5).

(I swear this is a sketch by my standards haha)

Despite my woes of being separated from my PC for a jam I was very excited to take part in, I still feel happy with my final product, especially as the sole developer on the project! Funnily enough, this idea came to mind during the final week of last year's Spooktober VN Jam. Perfect timing, thanks brain! But, I made sure to keep the idea in mind in time for this year.

As for ideas for future updates:

I would very much like to update the UI with my own design. On the final day I did start a UI of sorts, but I just didn't like it at all and decided to simply not worry about it/leave it for after the jam had ended. To me, in this particular instance, the UI was the last thing to worry about on my list of things to do. Thank goodness Ren'Py has premade UI the game can work with oh boy! And, I didn't want to feel unnecessarily stressed over a game jam haha (the process of moving can take over there).

I may also consider adding shading to the sprites and the illustrations themselves at a later point as well. To me, the UI is far more important, but still! Adding shading can always help things stand out more. I could also potentially make a sprite for the Cook as well, mainly because I'm someone who prefers it when any character, even minor ones, has a sprite to go with their text.

I intend to stagger these updates for now as I am a very busy person who has other projects I would like to tend to, but I will at least try and complete these updates either by October or November. I highly doubt it will take me two months to do such simple updates, but I am very prone to multiple curveballs at once haha.

Thanks for reading!